I don't think you get to make a black and white, general argument about this. How about this: if a person raises and cares for a chicken, giving it a charmed life it would have otherwise never had, but takes and eats its unfertilised eggs, then that's not morally wrong.
It's just not as obvious as people think, and your first sentence is a naive oversimplification and a great example of the kind of lazy argument I'm talking about. But I don't want to get into it with my friends since it's such a touchy subject, and I'll never get a decent conversation about it online.
I love vegans. A few of my friends are vegan. There are two things some vegans will say which boil my piss, however. First is that they have a moral high ground because they don't eat animals. This isn't a given, it's a complex and nuanced argument I'd happily partake in if the other party weren't approaching it with a top-down belief that they're already in the right.
Second is the notion that we should all be vegan to save the planet from climate apocalypse. I don't want this comment to get too long, but I have multiple problems with this faulty line of reasoning, and it muddies the waters. The only likely effect of it is that less progress is made on stopping global heating. So the upshot is that these people are literally sacrificing the ecosystem they purport to care about in order to bang their drum. Fuck that.
Just to fill in the background here, this wacko policy was introduced by Boris Johnson at some point in order to score some political points in one 24hr news cycle or another. Since then it's been championed by two of the most far-right Home Secretaries in the history of the office, with Braverman making it a wedge issue for the Tory party. Earlier this year, Sunak needed the support of the far right of his party, and he promised this bill to get that support. So, even though the law is "batshit" according to the current Home Secretary (yes that's real) we are going ahead with it purely because it's the only way to keep this government together for as long as possible. That is a maximum of eight months until the last possible moment they are forced to call an election.
To summarise: the UK government is breaking international law and subverting its own Supreme Court, along with any number of democratic processes, in order to push through a cruel, ludicrous and counterproductively expensive law just in order to hold on to power for weight months.
To summarise the summary: FUCK the Tories.
This is a valid reading of the Fermi paradox. But just for balance I'm going to devil's advocate all over it.
The chances of life to occur are small enough,
Not known. At the moment the data set is one habitable planet = one occurrence of life, so the odds might be very high indeed, even approaching 1:1
The chances of evolution to pass through multiple extinction events and producing a being capable of higher intelligence is even smaller,
They are smaller, but how much smaller is impossible to tell. What if extinction events are less frequent than they are here? What if 100% extinction events are as rare as they are here? What if intelligence is a natural point of evolution everywhere?
The chances they have done this faster than humans is smaller still,
This one's not true. The earth is relatively young at 4 billion years compared to 15 billion for the universe. A billion year headstart is completely plausible
The chances they have evolved close enough to us to have visited is near impossible.
Agreed that the earth's position in the milky way is a bit of a galactic backwater. At 25000 light years from the centre, stars are more sparse here than they are at the centre. But our nearest star is 4ly away. We could have a probe there within half a century with our current technology if we wanted to. So I disagree on the "near impossible" part.
The universe is huge, there's almost certainly life elsewhere - but to ask whether they visited earth is like speculating on whether ghosts exist.
Can't really argue with that. Until we see some evidence, ghosts and galactic visitors are in the 'conspiracy nut' bin. But it doesn't mean life on other planets doesn't exist. There are many theories why we wouldn't have seen or met alien life if it does exist. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
Also the universe is expanding at such a fast rate that unless we develop faster-than-light tech, we will never reach another solar system.
Hubble expansion isn't a big factor at the galactic level. Galaxies are traveling away from other galaxies at relative speeds faster than light, but for stars within the galaxy, the scale is infinitely smaller and the expansion is so small it's difficult to even measure.
I've been an urban pedestrian/cyclist all my life. Unfortunately I chose a career path that means I now have to work far from a city. I just failed my driving test. I don't even want to drive. I fucking hate this so much.
T'as oublié la liaison. La putain de liaison de merde fait chier.